Quote

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 8
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Travel Writer
Writer
Des Moines
Iowa
William Bryson
William Bill McGuire Bryson
William McGuire Bryson
Kind
Previous
Appalled
Suffered
Evidently
Users
Examined
Incontinence
Celebration
User
Rejoiced
Turned
Stains
Celebrations
Travel
Included
Mattress
Anything
Pillow
Mattresses
Much
Fascination
Bunk

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Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.
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In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.
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For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.
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Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.
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The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me it's anybody who's funny.
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To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.
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Cheapness is a great virtue.
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No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.
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Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
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There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
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Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
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Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
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From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
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Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you.
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Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.
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Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
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Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
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The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
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The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
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Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
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